Plastic Pontifications

It all started when our kettle broke and I had to make tea by boiling water in a pan like some kind of savage. 

Image Description:  The inside of a rubbish bin.  The plastic rubbish bin liner is pale green and the rubbish itself consists of a booze bottle, a crumpled Sugar Free Irn Bru can (it's just not as good as the discontinued original formula), plastic drinks containers, and more.

There were two problems annoying me, really: the first is that the kettle broke and the second is that this particular kettle always seemed to break after about 2 years, which is super wasteful.*

I bought this kettle because it didn’t have any plastic inside that touched the water when boiling. When I first started buying this brand of kettle, the choices for non-plastic kettles were pretty slim (as even steel kettles tended to have a plastic window so you could see the water level) and were limited to: the sort of kettle you boil on the stove, really expensive kettles, and the steel one by Russell Hobbs. We had 3 of the steel ones by Russell Hobbs in a row and this time ours came with a 3-year warranty instead of a two-year one, so when the kettle died 2 years and a few months after we bought it, we got a replacement under warranty. The thing is, though, the original kettle (rated very highly on Which? magazine) was discontinued so we got a slightly different one that turned out to be a rickety dinky ersatz version of the original kettle. It wobbled on its base and instead of having an all-steel interior, there was this weird tiny plastic or maybe rubber nobbly thing at the bottom. Well, I just about lost my head. We had gone through a huge fuss to get the replacement kettle (among other things, they were weird because of the 3-year instead of two-year warranty) and it was crappy and also had some THING in it that would leach out deadly toxic chemicals into our water and probably kill us all (or at the very least ruin our livers). I started looking for a new brand of plastic-free kettle and that’s when I realised that the plastic lids on all our kettles had been dripping plastic contaminated condensation right back into our kettle water!

We’ve traced the call and it’s coming from inside the house!

Now, you might think me dramatic, but I’ve known since the 1990s that plastic leaches chemicals into food. When I was a teenager, I read an article about a high school student who microwaved a bunch of food on plastic dishes and proved it as a science fair project.** I don’t remember where I read this, but I think it was in something like People magazine or something really mundane and not-sciency. The brief article was about high school girls doing cool stuff and the whole plastic contaminating your food thing was not the point of the article, but it stuck in my head and I was horrified. Forget the ducks with their bills caught in the six-pack toppers you didn’t cut, forget sea turtles starving to death with bellies full of plastic bags they mistook for jellyfish, plastic was hurting us.

That was the beginning of my anti-plastic crusade. When the BPA scare happened, I was, like, “well, duh!” When the carrier bag charge went into effect, I had already banned my family from using single-use plastic bags.*** When people started talking about microplastics in clothing, I had already stopped buying man-made fibres (although, to be fair, it was also because I hate how polycotton and acrylic shirts and sweaters pill, oh my god, that is so annoying and fuglacious).

A trip to the store will show you aisle after aisle of plastic items encased in layers of plastic. Cellophane covered plastic boxes hold plastic tubes, tubs, and bottles. Synthetic dental floss in a plastic case is encased in a plastic bubble on cardboard backing. Even the more sustainable alternatives like the cotton swabs made with paper sticks (why aren't they all made with paper sticks?) come in plastic tubs wrapped in cellophane.

All this is to say that the market is saturated with plastic items in plastic packaging, leaving us, the consumer, to find the plastic-free alternative. Given the near infinite amount of products available on the internet and in real life, this is a hugely daunting and stressful task, leaving us feeling guilty any time we compromise and buy plastic (for money or convenience reasons, etc.). Join any zero-waste or plastic-free Facebook group and you will see what I mean. It’s not just “should I buy loose-leaf tea from the bulk store instead of bagged tea that comes in plastic wrapped boxes?” There are people asking whether they should martyr themselves and go without, or if it’s okay to use the only products to which they aren’t allergic and medicinal products that they need even though they are available only in single-use plastic containers.

The problem is we are trapped in a corporatocracy, where the common man finds himself at the mercy of what big businesses want us to buy and they want us to buy plastic. If a high school kid in the 1990s knew that plastic leaches into food, you can bet all the plastic manufacturers did, too. But the BPA scare wasn’t until 2008, and BPA isn’t the only toxin in your plastic (the whole class of polycarbonate plastics are bad (even the BPA alternatives), PVC plastics contain phthalates, etc.). The contamination of food from chemicals found in plastics has been linked to hormone disruption, adverse neurological effects, fertility issues, obesity, cancer, asthma, kidney damage, and liver damage. Microplastics, which are thought to cause inflammation, gut biome disruption, and accelerated immune cell death, as well as being really good at absorbing and giving off pollutants, can cross through the blood brain barrier and the placenta.

Frustratingly, nonplastic alternatives are not only harder to find, but are often more expensive as they are usually made by smaller companies with intrinsically higher unit costs due to manufacturing on a small scale. On the rare occasion that larger companies, who benefit from economies of scale, sell eco-alternatives, they still keep their prices high, taking advantage of the fact that their only competitors are the small company guys with the higher unit costs and that people are usually willing to pay (or more likely simply used to paying) more for nonplastic alternatives.

Perhaps the onus should be on large corporations, who have the resources, power, and money at their disposal, to provide us with plastic free alternatives.

The good news for me and my kettle quest, is that there are more plastic-free interior kettle options than 8 years ago when I first started looking. I ended up getting a steel kettle by Ascot, which was £40 on Amazon and is super swanky, but if your budget is lower or you’re not a fan of the stainless steel aesthetic, there were some groovy glass ones that light up with LEDs when you’re boiling water and they only cost £25 or so. The bad news is that all these still come with packaging that includes plastic and the handles and switches are still plastic or have plastic on them, but at least the hot water for my green tea is plastic free.

Image description:  A shiny stainless steel retrofuturistic kettle with its switch glowing red sits upon my kitchen counter.  In the background is a white plastic toaster. 

I’m on a crusade to reduce unnecessary plastic consumption, so this is not the last you will hear from me on this subject. :D

You’ve reached the end of my blog entry, so here is some bonus content.

* Sidenote: toasters in the UK aren’t typically the right shape for bread. Are you confused? So is the entirety of the UK, and WTF are you even thinking, the toaster-making-people? Toasters are not tall enough for UK bread, so you have to either flip the toast upside-down and toast it again, resulting in an overly toasted middle, or you get one of those “four-slice toasters” that is really just two elongated toast holes and you toast the bread on its side. We went through several of those (one even caught fire, and while I was saying we should unplug the toaster and pour water on it to put out the fire, my husband calmly carried the flaming toaster (that would make a great band name) outside, at which point, it burnt itself out) before finding one that had a lifespan longer than 2 years. (It’s the “Morrisons 4-slice value toaster” if you’re interested and it was only £8. Pity it’s plastic and not stainless steel, but I TRIED it with stainless steel toasters and they all broke.)

** After lots of googling, I managed to find this recap of the girl’s experiments: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-07-mn-27486-story.html

*** Random: the best excuse I’ve heard for plastic bags is so homeless people have something to poop in (this is a genuine problem in some areas). I’ve never pooped in a bag, but compostable ones would do just as well, I imagine. Change my mind! XD

Finally, I’d like to shoutout to kid#2, who sneaked this into the first draft of my article: Butthole the photo lol yay I like butts butthole fat